OPEN365

My 2 cents. A few ideas.... Some may work for you and some may not. Whatever you do it takes persistence. You need immediate results to stay alive. You're in survival mode and must employ every angle you can while you build up your base. You're at war and must go on the offensive! Here's what I've done. It gave us immediate results! Enough to stay alive while we build up our business. Though I'm already located in a high income area I continue to target even more high income earners in other nearby communities. Get on craigslist ASAP and start there for free today. CL sounds like a poor mans portal but let me tell you it has made me hundreds of thousands of dollars in this business. Get your wife on there ASAP and have her post ads continuously on a daily basis, if anything it gives her good practice and keeps her focused on selling and tweaking your message to use in other channels. Message we promote: People drive up to an hour for our honesty, integrity and expertise. Drive an extra 10-15-20-30 minutes and save $100's more. 10% additional discount for residents living in xxxx cities... Why are customers from St. Louis driving all the way out to Alorton, IL? Then describe the benefits of your shop. This works as a good way to attract locals as well because if people are coming out from St. Louis than it must be good enough for me too. I can't tell you how many new customers we earned because of this... etc., etc.. In this economy people recognize the benefits of driving to a lower income area to fix their cars. Believe me I fight those shops off everyday because people are willing to drive 20 minutes to save $100. Yes the 3 or 5 mile radius rule still exist but for now you need to run a concurrent marketing strategy seeking local but also a few extra long distance customers. Take advanatge of the economy and people's fixation with saving money no matter how far you are. The whole idea is that you need to go beyond your made up borders and you will be surprised at the fact that you will generate an additional 10-15K per month just by doing this. Get on Google Adwords and increase your online presence on google search and your own website. 50% of our new business comes from these sources. While you're sitting at your shop dead, others are reaping the rewards when potential customers use their phone to search for a local mechanic and their listing pops up. Hire someone to set this up. IT'S WELL WORTH THE INVESTMENT! You and your wife need to go business to business introducing yourselves and passing out flyers in your immediate area. Introduce yourself to business owners and employees. These are people who are employed and making money and need their cars to run everyday. Offer a free pick up and drop off service. You can't win the war if you can't conquer ground zero. Your shop helper could be out putting flyers on cars or hire yourself a flyer guy. First day we went out we got ourselves 3 new customers and more calls follwed up. This one has worked like a charm and has helped us close more deals. As we all know giving quotes over the phone is not good business but when you have people whom you know will not bring their car in or who live a good distance away you must give a quote. After giving a quote and customer does not buy and says I will think about it etc and you end the call. Call them back 10 minutes later and say I continued to make more calls trying to find you a better deal on the parts that are needed to fix your car and found it for $20 less, so now your total will be $x. People appreciate it and feel comfortable in knowing that your fighting for every dollar. Next thing you know they say ok let's do it. Service writing training for your wife or just hiring one with experience is key to your success. If you don't hear me on this one you are missing out on big money. Our service writer has closed a ton of deals my wife and I would have never been able to close and for more money. When we first employed the above ideas our closing ratio was 6/10 it has now dropped a bit due to the fact that we're busy and not enough space! You need to make sure you have positve reviews on Google and Yelp. If you don't have this your shop will not survive. This is what people do nowadays. It's become a habit. If they look you up and you have no positive reviews prepare to close your shop or suffer lower revenues. Talk to local towing companies and pay them their fees to drop off cars at your shop. This option is starting to bear fruit for us. Facebook recently changed their advertiser strategy and you can now promote yourself locally to people in your immediate zip codes with a lot more ease and expanded features. I just ran a two week campaign and gained 120 new local followers. I now have 120 new local followers who I will start to promote our services to. My goal is to be at 1,000 by end of this month. I will do this by increasing my FB advertising budget. This is where your wife needs to be. We haven't even began to try to sell them and we already sold 2 brake jobs and an oil change. So we know these people are receptive and reading our posts on Facebook. Send your email list over to your facebook page. When you send out your email make sure it's at the right time. Don't send it at 8 am. People are just getting in and checking a ton of emails. Instead send it between 9-11am or 2-3pm. Just my 2 cents. Post went kinda long so make that 5 cents.

JustTheBest, that's a great idea.